Monticello Middle School

Monticello Middle School in Monticello, AR, serves 327 students in grades 6 through 8 and is part of the Monticello School District, which ranks in the bottom 23rd percentile of Arkansas school districts. The school has a 1-star rating from Schooldigger, placing it in the 26th percentile statewide for the 2025-2026 school year, a significant drop from its historical performance between 2015 and 2019 when it consistently ranked in the 56th to 69th percentile. About 62% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, and the school spends approximately $12,715 per student, which is relatively high for the area.

The most concerning trend is a dramatic and sustained decline in state ranking over the past eight years, dropping 43 percentile points from a high of the 69th percentile in 2017-2018. This is especially stark when compared to nearby Warren Middle School, which has shown recent improvement, jumping from the 24th to the 49th percentile. A critical weakness is in 8th-grade mathematics, where only 13.7% of students were proficient in 2025-2026, far below the state average of 36.2% and the performance of Warren Middle School (41.9%) and Drew Central Middle School (35.3%). Interestingly, the school shows an anomalous strength in Algebra, with 57.1% of students proficient, but this likely reflects a strategy of placing only top-performing 8th graders into Algebra, masking the broader math struggles for most students.

Despite higher spending than nearby schools, Monticello Middle School's academic outcomes are lower than Warren's and comparable to Drew Central's, suggesting potential issues with resource allocation or instructional effectiveness. The school also shows a clear grade-level performance gap, with English Language Arts proficiency dropping from 34.5% in 6th grade to 24.8% in 8th grade. This pattern, along with a failure to recover from pandemic-era disruptions, indicates the school is continuing to lose ground relative to other schools in the state.